Short film

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

By / / 1950s, 1959 / Leave a Comment

This past week was our short-film week, and I was surprised to see that our film club had never watched Richard Lester‘s and Peter Sellers‘ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. That had to be my pick for our interstitial week.

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The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

Where to watch: Just Watch

Rather than critique the short, I want to explain why I chose it.

Okay, I’m a sucker for droll British humor. I fell in love with Monty Python’s Flying Circus back in the 1970s, tracked down LPs of The Goon Show in the 1980s, and can rewatch Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and two Musketeer films — The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers — anytime and thoroughly enjoy them.

Unlike many short films we’ve watched, this one wasn’t an early attempt to break into the business. Pretty much everyone involved in Running — Lester, Sellers, Dick Bentley, Spike Milligan, Leo McKern, Mario Fabrizi, and David Lodge — was an industry veteran, mostly in television and radio, but in a few films, too. If they weren’t already familiar — if not famous — names or faces when the short was made, they would become so later on.

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Hairat

By / / 2010s, 2017 / Leave a Comment

Our film club finished up our latest cycle last week. So before we begin again, we all make a pick for our short-film festival. I won’t offer any comments here about the other picks (which were all enjoyable to watch); just some thoughts on mine.

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Hairat

Where to watch: Just Watch

Last Friday, before our Zoom film club, I was coming back from a conference in Tampa, when we stopped at a rest stop on I-75 just past Paynes Prairie.

To me, a prairie means dry grasslands, without trees, but possibly plenty of gophers. Of course, that isn’t the case in Florida. There’s plenty of water, and it resembles a swamp from the interstate.

As we’re pulling into the rest stop, I see people gathered along a chain-link fence separating the rest stop from a storm-water retention pond. An alligator has everyone’s attention.

We get out of the car and walk over to a 7- to 8-foot gator about a yard away — on the other side of the fence. (Yes, gators can climb fences, but by my calculations, I could run faster than it could climb.)

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Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell

By / / 1970s, 1972 / Leave a Comment

My pick for this week’s Criterion Channel movie club was a no-budget short, Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell, from 1972.

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Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell

Where to watch: Just Watch

Why a short? After everyone has had a movie pick, our Friday night film club has a short-film festival, as it were. Before starting a new cycle of picks, we have an interstitial week where everyone suggests a short film, typically no longer than 15 minutes.

The silent Zorgon runs about 9 minutes, so it gets right to the action. Someone — or some thing — is killing people in a Southern California valley. When the police aren’t acting quickly enough, neighbors band together to find the killer. A la Scooby-Doo, the villain is a throwback humanoid with legs that awkwardly split into feet and tentacles.

According to IMDB, the movie was a class project for director Kevin Fernan, who also played one of Zorgon’s first victims. (It also appears that this was his only film production.)

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